The African Agriculture Technology Foundation (AATF) has introduced the stewardship program as part of efforts to ensure farmers get quality seeds, especially the Pod Borer Resistant (PBR) cowpea seed.
The stewardship programme is also targeting at educating the farmers on good farm management practices in order to get the desired result after planting.
The Program Officer of AATF, West Africa, Francis Nwankwo, while speaking with Nigerian Tribune, said the PBR cowpea as a new technology, like many other technologies, needed to be managed.
He further said if not properly managed the benefits that the farmers were supposed to get would be eluded.
He explained, “stewardship simply refers to the responsible management of a product and is not only applicable to Genetically Modified products or biotechnology-based products, it is for any technology whatsoever that farmers are using, if they are not managed properly it will not give the maximum benefits.
“Stewardship enhances product durability and sustainability and involves some dos and don’ts which are often summarized in the Technology-Use Guide (TUG).
“It’s just like, there are some times you go to the hospital and they give you a medication and advise you to avoid something that has vitamin C, because the vitamin C may interfere with the pathway that the medication works, so the pharmacist will tell you to take the medication with something that doesn’t have vitamin C.
“In this case the Pharmacist fulfils their stewardship responsibility by advising the patient on the best way to make the medication effective, while the patient does their part by sticking to the instruction.
He said stewardship good for the integrity of the people who developed the technology, because if the technology doesn’t work, the farmers will complain.
“Then on the part of the farmers it is also good for them to get maximum benefit, and it is the adherence to the stewardship guidelines that enables sustainable benefits on the product”, he added.
He further added that stewardship is just about responsible management of the product, which begins from the time it is being developed in the laboratory to the field by the scientists, and then goes to the seed companies who produce the seed and to the farmers who grow the seeds.
“For the insect resistant beans that has just been released, stewardship involves managing quality, ensuring trait purity, certifying the various classes of seeds, complying with the insect resistance management (IRM) and integrated pest management (IPM) protocols, and continuous monitoring.Everybody on the product chain have responsibility to maintain Stewardship.
“For example, with vaccines, sometimes you see people moving around to vaccinate for polio or any other disease, if you notice they carry vaccines in a bag that has an ice pack in it because those vaccines cannot survive if the cold chain is broken.
“Now, if the cold chain is broken at any point, it means the organisms in the vaccine will die, even if you receive the vaccination, it is not going to work, so to make it viable, you have to maintain the cold chain from the place of production until the time it enters into the body of the receiver. So, the entire process of maintaining that cold chain is what is called Stewardship”, he explained.
On how stewardship would aid in curbing seed adulteration, Nwankwo said “we are making an arrangement with something that already exist in Nigeria, if you notice, if you buy most antibiotics now Nigeria, you find out that they have a kind of code that is in the pack, when you scratch it, you can text the number and get an immediate response to know if the product is adulterated or not.
“Mobile Authentication Service (MAS) scheme will be used as one of the anticounterfeiting strategies to detect adulterated and falsified pod borer resistant (PBR) cowpea seeds
“The codes will be encrypted on every authentic seed package so that the farmers can quickly verify their seed using their mobile phones.
“We anticipate that people may package anything and give to farmers in the name of PBR cowpea, so to ensure that farmers get the right quality, we will use that approach, taking advantage of the mobile phone technology and those scratch codes to confirm that the seeds are well certified”.
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